6. DA1469x – Connecting The Board

6.1. Introduction

This section describes the installation procedure for the drivers, the configuration of the serial port, and all necessary steps to verify the connection with the PC as well as solutions to any problems that may occur.

6.2. Requirements of the Development PC

For proper evaluation and application development using the DA1469x SoC and the ProDK an external host is required. This external host must have an operating system already installed (Windows or Linux) and USB ports as described in Section 2.

6.3. Driver installation

6.3.1. Microsoft Windows

On first connection to a host PC running Microsoft Windows, the system will detect several devices and will automatically install all necessary drivers. If the system is configured to use Microsoft Windows Update, this may take several minutes to complete.

When the driver installation is complete, the system displays a Microsoft windows similar to the one presented in Figure 7.

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Figure 7 Windows driver installation

There are two virtual COM ports created by the Windows driver. The first COM port (lower number, COM25 in this example) provides a UART interface between the PC and the DA1469x device. The second (higher number, COM26 in this example) is used to export measurement data from the current sense circuitry on the ProDK Kit to the Power Profiler tool. For more information on the Power Profiler, see the SmartSnippets Toolbox User Manual (UM-B-083).

Note

The COM port numbers assigned to the ProDK Kit motherboard might be different to the ones shown in Figure 7.

Note

If Your PC has a serial port on it, then that’s the COM1 you’re seeing. Hence you can’t make a communication between the ProDK Kit board and the Windows on that port. But you can do it only by using the other lowest COM port, COM25 in this case.

The COM port numbers can be found in the Windows Device Manager (Control Panel > Device Manager > Ports (COM & LPT)) as shown in Figure 8.

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Figure 8 Device Manager Ports

6.3.2. Linux

When ProDK is connected to a host PC running a Linux distribution (such as Ubuntu or CentOS) and has Internet connectivity, the system will detect several devices and all necessary drivers will be silently installed. Provided that the process has properly finished, two additional devices will appear in the /dev directory under the names ttyUSB0 and ttyUSB1, as shown in Figure 9. These names might be different in case other serial converters are connected to the system beforehand. If no other serial port converters are connected, the device that should be used with the terminal or programmer utility will be called /dev/ttyUSB0. If there are more devices with the name ttyUSBx, note which ones showed up when the ProDK was connected and use the lower number of the two devices.

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Figure 9 Ports assigned to ProDK

6.3.3. COM port usage

There are two virtual COM ports created by the driver with either Windows or Linux. The first (lower number) is used to export a UART from the DA1469x device. In the previous sections this was either COM25 or /dev/ttyUSB0. The second (higher number) is used to export measurement data from the current sense circuitry on the ProDK to the Power Profiler tool.

6.4. Configuring the serial port for UART2

Several development tools require UART2 to be routed to the FTDI serial port. Please refer to DA1469x Development Kit - Pro for details on how to properly configure the specific port. ProDK board connection verification can be made using the pre-existing Terminal application.

Note

The ProDK is typically shipped with the “pxp_reporter” project programmed in it. In such a case the serial output is as indicated in Figure 10 and Figure 12 LED behavior will be as described in Section 8.

6.4.1. Windows Host

On a Windows Host the utility Tera Term can be used to fully validate the connection to the ProDK.

Tera Term is a free software terminal emulator (communication program) which supports multiple communication including Serial port connections. Download Teraterm from https://ttssh2.osdn.jp. Run the teraterm-x.yy.exe and follow the installation wizard.

To make sure that the communication between the ProDK board and the development host is properly established, it is necessary to verify the UART connection between the two nodes. To do so, execute the following steps:

  • Step 1 Connect the ProDK board to the PC board via USB cable to USB1(DBG) as shown in Figure 6.

  • Step 2 Verify that the host discovered two serial ports – the first is connected to UART2 (see section Section 6.3.1).

  • Step 3 Open Tera Term from the Windows Start menu.

  • Step 4 In the Tera Term: New connection dialog, select Serial, then select the COM Port to use, and click OK.

  • Step 5 Select Setup > Serial Port a as shown in Figure 10 and configure your UART port using the parameters as shown in Table 4.

Table 4 Parameters for connecting to UART2

Settings

Values

Baud rate

115200

Data bits

8

Parity

None

Stop bits

1

Handshaking

None

Warning

To get the control of the COM port You need to be an administrator on your local machine.

  • Step 6 Open the the Lowest COM port number assigned to the ProDK, refer to Figure 9 to figure out which port number is used by Windows by running the Windows Device Manager. Make sure that the UART is configured as shown in the Table 4. Once you have a connection, you should start to see something as shown in Figure 10. The DA1469x device uses random BLE addresses, so a new address is generated on every reset button push.

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Figure 10 Terminal output via Tera Term (Windows)

6.4.2. Linux Host

Under Linux there is a simpler approach to validate the connection using a basic terminal such as putty. Connect putty to /dev/ttyUSB0 at 115200 baud using this linux command sudo putty /dev/ttyUSB0 -serial -sercfg 115200,8,n,1,N or run putty as in shown in Figure 11

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Figure 11 Setting port and testing connectivity in Linux

Once you have a connection, you should start to see something as shown in Figure 12. This is the output under Linux with putty. The DA1496X device use random BLE addresses, new address is generated on every reset button push.

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Figure 12 Terminal outpout via putty (Linux)

6.5. Troubleshooting

If there any problems with the ProDK connection to PC some possible solutions might be:

  • Make sure that the Host PC is connected to Internet

  • Make sure that no old FTDI drivers are installed. Drivers are available from the FTDI website.

  • Check for possible cabling issue by using a different USB cable

  • Connect the two elements using a different USB port on the host PC

Note

If none of these actions resolved the issue, please contact Dialog Software Forum.